The Memory Keepers

by Natasha Ngan

  The worst.

  ‘Then, late in the twenty-first century, of course, was the Big Dip, where stock prices crashed and international relations were at their most tenuous. And of course, the EU’s dissolution and the subsequent riots and mini-wars. And of course, the Warming had taken full effect on the world, with the British Isles’ climate mutating and the instability of the seasons. Temperatures were rising by an average of three degrees each decade. And of course … ’

  Alba propped her head in her hands as though listening intently, her face dutifully cast towards the front of the classroom even though her eyes (not to mention her brain) were half-closed.

  Professor Nightingale was really not helping the situation, she thought. Practically everything about him was designed to make staying awake in his lessons even harder. His flat, droning voice and the way his face was shrivelled with wrinkles, as deep as the creases in his plaid suit. What was left of his hair clung to the top of his head in a wispy cloud.

  Alba’s eyes fluttered shut. Professor Nightingale was going on about something boring – no change there – and she felt herself drifting off on the current of his voice, a soft wave pulling her towards sleep. She sunk lower into her chair. The silk of her school-dress clung tightly to her skin, feeling as warm and cosy as her duvet back home, and she was just slipping away into dreams, when –

  ‘Mistress White? Could you tell us the exact date of the Independence Governance Treaty signed by all eight of the proposed city-states here in the British Isles?’

  Alba jerked awake. Professor Nightingale was staring right at her from the front of the classroom. His bug-like eyes wobbled behind round-framed spectacles. The room was silent, every student holding their breath (the mere mention of Alba’s family name was enough to do that to a class).

  Hurriedly, Alba straightened. ‘The sixteenth of January, 2101, Professor,’ she answered promptly.

  That was an easy one. The date was a Bank Holiday for Londoners, set to commemorate the event. All North children were taught how the British Isles had dissolved into eight city-states at the start of the twenty-second century to be ruled independently by separate Lord Ministers. It was the result of decades of conflict, competition for overseas business, and social tensions, which had grown too much for the national government. The cities were still bound to national laws observed by a representative board of delegates from each city, but for the most part they functioned individually. London’s current Lord Minister was a French-born man named Christian Burton-Lyon, elected mainly because of his connections with European traders.

  Professor Nightingale nodded. ‘Correct, Mistress White. Five-thirty p.m. to be exact. And could you also tell us the date of the subsequent Memory-Surfing and Trading Practices Summit, where the International Memory Laws were created?’

  This was a tougher one. Alba glanced down at her schoolbook; its pages were empty.

  ‘Oh, er … ’ she murmured, trying to look busy by fussing with her notebook, her mind scrambling for the answer.

  They had not yet learnt the detailed history of memory-surfing. Alba knew roughly what had happened from Net programmes and articles, and brief overviews in their school textbooks. After neuroscientific breakthroughs in the late twenty-first century, the first memory-machines were created, right here in London. Though they had initially been used for medical research – diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia were on the rise – after the collapse of the national government the reduction in state funding meant the research companies turned to private investors. New consumer uses for memory-machines were developed, and with growing numbers of investors from overseas becoming involved, the technology was soon taken up by a number of other countries.

  The concept of memory-surfing and trading was understandably popular. At the time, oil reserves were almost depleted, international relations had been strenuous for decades, and technology had become increasingly insular, people more used to screens than nature. The ability to explore the world from the comfort of a memory-machine fitted into that backdrop perfectly. It wasn’t a cheap exercise, however. In London, with the divide between North and South, a culture of memory-surfing was cultivated in the North, while for Southers it was a luxury; often one they never got to experience.

  But those were just the basics of what had happened. Alba knew little of the details, such as when the Memory-Surfing and Trading Practices Summit had been held.

  She snuck a hopeful glance at Rosemary Dalton’s book on the table next to hers, which (what a surprise) was positively smothered in notes, but Rosemary – a big blonde girl with a piggy face constantly trapped in a sneer – caught her looking and stamped her arm across the pages. Alba sighed. Twirling a loose curl of her thick red hair round one finger, she tried to look thoughtful.

  ‘I – I think it was something like the twenty-third of March, 2138, Professor? Or was it 2137 … ’ She drifted off, cheeks reddening.

  Professor Nightingale’s sigh was so long and slow it almost sent Alba nodding off again. ‘No, Mistress White,’ he said, breaths whistling through his nose, ‘it was neither of those dates. It was, of course, the second of May, 2138.’

  ‘Of course it was,’ muttered Alba beneath her breath.

  Dolly was waiting for her outside the school gates when classes finished. Even though Knightsbridge Academy was only twenty minutes from her house, Alba wasn’t allowed to walk home alone. Before Dolly had persuaded them to let Alba walk – with Dolly as a chaperone, of course – Alba’s parents used to send her to school in one of their chauffeur-driven Bentleys with the family crest rising up in silver metal from the end of its hood. She had hated it, because it meant that every single person they passed on the street knew exactly who was inside.

  Well, not that it was Alba, but that it was her family, and that was the problem.

  Dolly was squinting in the late-afternoon sunshine, half-turned towards the road. She wore her servant’s uniform of white silk pinafore, blouse and stockings, the White family’s crest embroidered in black thread on her apron pocket. Her long purple hair was tied sleekly in two buns on top of her head.

  Alba hurried across the schoolyard. In the playground, young children were shouting and laughing, their cries cutting through the thick, heat-choked air. The street beyond the gates was busy with traffic. The vibration of cars skimming down the road, smooth from their electric engines, rolled against Alba’s skin like rippling waves in the air.

  Dolly turned before Alba could sneak up on her and tickle her waist.

  ‘Not this time,’ she said in her bright, warm voice. Her youthful face crinkled into a smile. She brushed a loose hair back from Alba’s face and they started down the street. ‘How was your day? I hope you learnt a lot.’

  Alba snorted. ‘Oh, tons,’ she said, lacing an arm round Dolly’s waist.

  Alba loved how slim Dolly was. Dolly had the sort of body her mother called boyish but Alba thought was beautiful; tall and slender, soft muscles sliding over sharp bones. Alba wished she looked like Dolly. Instead, she was plump and short for her sixteen years. She was glad they at least had some similarities in their faces. Both of them had strong cheekbones, curved chins, and large, wide-set eyes, though Dolly’s were blue and Alba’s green.

  Alba liked to imagine sometimes that Dolly was her sister. She didn’t know any other of the Knightsbridge Academy girls who were as close to their handmaids (though she didn’t really know any of the other Knightsbridge Academy girls in the first place. It was hard to make friends when she was only known for being Alastair White’s daughter, and her parents never let her spend much time away from the house outside of school). Handmaids were traditionally paired with their charges at a young age to create a sisterly bond. Dolly had only been around nine when Alba was born, and she learnt her role by shadowing and aiding Alba’s mother’s handmaid, who looked after Alba until Dolly was old enough to take on the role fully. She was still young, in her mid-twenties now.

  Alba had heard som
e of the other girls at school talking down about their handmaids. Even though a lot of servants were from the lesser families in North, many were from South, and there was always that divide running between families and their help. An invisible wall, a barrier slicing the two worlds neatly in half.

  North.

  South.

  Light, and its shadow.

  But there was none of that between Alba and Dolly. If anything, Alba felt as though Dolly were the only one with her on her side of the wall. Everything else in North was on the other side; detached, a façade of glittering glass and jewels and fake smiles. A world she never quite felt part of.

  ‘Did you have Professor Nightingale again today, by any chance?’ Dolly asked, grinning down at Alba.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Why else do you think I’ve turned into a zombie?’

  Dolly laughed, and it was a sound like bells, bright peals that drifted down around them, as soft and light as summer rain, and for the millionth time Alba wished that it was Dolly who could be her mother, her sister, her family, and take her far, far away from here.

  3

  SEVEN

  ‘What an effing waste of time that was,’ Seven grumbled to himself as he pulled off the metal cap and let it drop on its cables to the side of the memory-machine. He rubbed his temples where the pincers had dug. ‘That’s eight minutes and thirty-one seconds of my life I’m never getting back. You’re going in the bin, R.L.S. And you!’ He detached the wristbands from his arms and waggled a finger at the room. ‘You better get your act together. Dunno why that skid was in that cabinet. It should’ve been filed under So Boring Your Eyes Will Fall Out.’

  Grinning at his own joke, he glanced round the room, half-waiting for a laugh he knew wouldn’t come. There was no cabinet under that name. Instead, he’d stuck the label to the bin behind the door.

  Seven pushed the machine to the corner of the room, distracted now. How did that skid end up in the Fear, Desperation and General Wetting-your-pants Kind of Stuff cabinet? Every new memory he thieved was filed away after its first surf. There was no way he’d have ever considered that one as anywhere near pant-wetting stuff. It was just a vast, empty space of blackness that seemed to have no end, and the low buzz of voices whose words he couldn’t make out. He must have made a mistake when sorting it.

  But as Seven slipped out of the room, locking the door quickly behind him, an unbidden thought fluttered at the corner of his mind: I’m a skid-thief. I don’t make mistakes.

  I can’t afford to.

  Seven had a few hours to kill before going to the skid-market that night, so he spent the rest of the afternoon on the roof of the flats where he lived. Because Butler often overheated, he was limited to just one or two surfs a day. If he didn’t have to worry about breaking his memory-machine for good, Seven knew he’d be on it all the time. There wasn’t much else to do around South.

  The roof had become his private hang-out place. He told himself it was because he liked the view – which was true – but he ignored the other truth. That the group of big boys who hung in the courtyard, smoking and drinking cheap beer and vandalising every inanimate object in sight, saw Seven as an experiment to find the limits of how many punches a teenage boy can take and still stand (hint – not that many). So he’d learnt to stay well away whenever their voices echoed up from the courtyard.

  Seven could hear them now from where he sat on the edge of the rooftop, thirty floors up. He was positioned facing the city towards North: the beautiful half of London, all glittering glass towers, green parks and immaculate homes. This view was one of the reasons he’d moved into this particular block of flats. The building was right on the upper edge of Vauxhall, next to the broad band of the River Thames, silver now under the blaze of the sun.

  Watching North from high up here, Seven could pretend he was a part of its world. That he wasn’t stuck on a pigeon-dirtied rooftop in South. That there weren’t grimy, smog-choked streets stretching out behind his back like an ugly grey blanket. That all he had to do was open his arms and he’d fly out over the swollen curve of the river, and South would be a thing of the past.

  (Seven would never admit it to anyone, not even himself – but once, a couple of years ago on his fifteenth birthday, after a particularly bad run-in with the courtyard boys, he had seriously considered opening his arms and jumping from the edge of the rooftop, knowing full well he wouldn’t fly.)

  Closing his eyes, Seven leant back on his arms, legs stretched out in front of him. Even though it was late afternoon the sun was still strong. A heavy, pressing tongue of heat. Sweat prickled his skin, sticking his thin shirt and slim blue trousers to his skin.

  He tried not to think about what he’d be doing that night. Seven always felt nervous the day before a job. Excitement came when darkness fell, the whole city seeming to take on a different identity in the night, transforming into a world where anything was possible.

  But this was no ordinary job. This was the White family’s house. It was like looping a noose round your own effing neck and handing the rope to the devil.

  ‘Hey, man.’

  Seven jumped at the voice. Thinking it was the boys from the courtyard, he scrambled to his feet and spun round, but it was just one of his flatmates, Kola.

  Kola was a tall, wiry Malaysian boy with handsome features and deep mahogany skin. He’d come to London when he was ten to escape the ethnic riots that had claimed the lives of his family. Though they got on OK, there was something about Kola that unsettled Seven. Maybe it was how quiet he was, sombre even, or the fact that Kola’s eyes were so dark you felt as though you were falling into them when you looked straight at him.

  The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds. Then, breaking his gaze, Kola strolled over and sat down beside Seven. He looked out at the city.

  ‘So this is where you go every day.’ He spoke slowly, every word turned in his thick Malaysian accent.

  Seven shrugged. ‘Nowhere else to go, really.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And the view … ’

  ‘It is good,’ said Kola, nodding. ‘I come here too sometimes, though I don’t often get to see it in the daylight.’

  They fell silent. Seven thought this was probably the longest conversation they’d had since Kola answered his ad for a flatmate four years ago. Kola worked at the docks during the day and Seven was out thieving at night (not that Kola knew that – Seven told him he did night shifts at a construction site), so their paths rarely crossed.

  ‘I thought I should warn you,’ Kola said suddenly. ‘The boys who hang out in the courtyard. One of them said he saw you come up here. They were thinking about coming to look for you.’

  Instinctively, Seven’s body tensed. It was as though every inch of him remembered the feeling of the boys’ knuckles, their heavy boots, and was trying to shrink away, hide from the memory of the pain.

  The possibility of more.

  He swallowed hard.

  ‘Do you want to fight them?’

  Seven snapped his head round. Kola was staring ahead, gaze still trained on North. His face was expressionless. Sunlight turned his dark eyes amber.

  ‘Do I … what?’ Seven spluttered.

  Kola didn’t turn. ‘Do you want to fight them?’ he repeated, voice flat. ‘It’s just that we’re a bit outnumbered.’

  A strangled laugh caught in Seven’s throat. Understatement of the effing century, he thought. It took him a few seconds more to realise Kola had said we.

  ‘Er, maybe next time.’

  Kola nodded. He stood up, patting down his trousers. ‘Well, they’ll be here in a few minutes.’ Before Seven could reply, he turned and walked back to the stairs leading down from the roof.

  Seven waited a couple of minutes before hurrying down after him. By the time he got back to their flat on the twenty-third floor, the door to Kola’s room was shut, the silence behind it sounding louder than it ever had before.

  4

  ALBA
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br />   The house was quiet when Alba and Dolly arrived home. They’d taken their time, going on a detour through the grounds of the estate, Alba telling Dolly all about stuck-up Rosemary Dalton and the two of them laughing as they planned increasingly outrageous ways to get revenge. But as soon as they walked through the tall front doors of the house, they fell silent.

  Something was wrong.

  Alba knew the rhythms of the house inside out. Late in the afternoon on a school day it should be filled with noises: voices drifting from the kitchens as the maids prepared dinner; cutlery clinking as the butlers set the dining table. Her mother would be in her parents’ private quarters in the east wing, reading or listening to music, or talking on a tablet with another society wife.

  But today the house was silent. Alba’s heart began to flutter. Her mother must be having one of her bad turns.

  She hadn’t had one in a long while. She’d been kind, happy, on the sunlit side of her coin. It was only a matter of time before she fell back into the darkness.

  Dolly squeezed Alba’s shoulder reassuringly. ‘I’ll find out what it is,’ she whispered, before heading off towards the kitchens.

  Alba waited. The silence was heavy, pressing in on her like a weight. It’ll pass, it’ll pass, she thought over and over, something she’d done since young to calm herself when bad things were about to happen.

  It’ll pass.

  It’ll pass.

  When Dolly returned a few minutes later, Alba could tell straight away by the look on her face that things were not going to pass this time. Not for a long time.

  And not without trouble.

  ‘Straight to your room,’ Dolly said quietly, clutching Alba’s hand and leading her across the hall. It would have been quicker going up the curving flight of stairs that swept up one side, but that brought them too close to her parents’ quarters. Too close to her mother. They went instead to the servants’ staircase at the back of the house.